


Down at the Cafe, Everything Is Numb

by Elise_Davidson (orphan_account)



Series: 25 Ways to Sing [3]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, Non-canon comic book, movie-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 09:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/860639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Elise_Davidson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, Tony sees enough grey to make the hard choices. It's not until his lungs are caving as he watches the harsh line of earth's atmosphere meet space that his last memory is really just Steve. And it's only just Steve, a few months on, that reminds him that he's just Tony, and he doesn't have to feel numb."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down at the Cafe, Everything Is Numb

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the unnecessary non-fandom spam; I was doing the series thing all wrong.
> 
> Song: "Everything Went Numb" and "Down, Down, Down to Mephisto's Café"-Streetlight Manifesto

In the end, Tony's the one who sees in shades of grey enough to make the more difficult decisions. In the end, everyone's trying to save themselves, he figures—no one's going to look for someone trying to save everyone.

Even as he flies into the vacuum, he can feel his suit failing. He can feel the utter want to have gotten through to Pepper before he decided to take everything into his own hands. He can feel the metal crunching, the zero temperature closing in and collapsing his lungs.

From a scientific point of view, he knows his head won't explode in the zero-pressure of space. He calculates mentally how fast he is flying, how fast is he traveling versus the Chitauri coming in through the wormhole, Tony himself hasn't achieved free-fall, he's still fighting to get through—

Above it all, he remembers how blue the earth looked behind him, how stark it was against the black of space, the pure, crystalline color of it, the unmoving shade that, upon further thought, was little more than a beacon for other alien races to come and steal its resources.

Steve was his last thought before he blacked out.

When Tony wakes up again, he thinks that he wasn't made to fly. His body is exhausted, he needs a drink. When he fights harder and longer than he ever has before, all he can think of is defending that harsh blue-upon-black that only other astronauts have seen.

They won't remember what he did, the people. The Avengers might, but nobody else will. A part of him shouts that it was for nothing, it was for people to write fable stories about. It would be a story, where people told their children that Iron Man spit on the righteous few, gave them hell, and bade them farewell.

When Tony thinks back, he doesn't think of what he did for the people. He doesn't think about how he saved the few things he did care about (Pepper, Happy, the people of earth).

It's mostly because he doesn't remember much about the trip through the wormhole, or anything after. When anyone asks, the only thought going through his brain is "don't crack, jack...because you might not make it back…and even if you do, you'll be alone—who wants to live like that?".

It's only months later, when Steve grips his wrist, and gives him an angrily hesitant look, that Tony remembers the sharp blue of sky as he left the safety of earth, left everything he knew, left behind the notion that he'd come out alive because he was Tony-Goddamn-Stark…

Eventually, everything had gone numb.

But when Steve kisses him, months and months upon days even after Thor had taken Loki back, all of those memories go numb, and it's just Tony, and everything is laid bare and open, and Tony is simply Tony.

Nothing is numb after that, and, when Steve's with him, Tony sometimes thinks maybe he was meant to fly.

xxFINxx


End file.
